Macrina the Younger

Lived

c. 330–379

Era

The fathers

Where

Cappadocia

Tradition

The apostolic communities

The household that produced the Cappadocian theology

Eldest of the ten children of a prominent Cappadocian family, she refused a second betrothal after her fiancé died, and turned the family estate at Annisa into a community where household and servants lived under a common rule.

Why it matters

Her brother Gregory of Nyssa wrote both her Life and a dialogue, On the Soul and the Resurrection, in which she is the teacher and he the pupil taking instruction on her deathbed — a role reversal he presents without apology. She is credited by that family with turning Basil from ambition to asceticism, and the monastic rule he wrote, which still governs eastern monasticism, grew out of the community she had already built.

All the figures, from the apostolic age to the present, or the timeline they stand in.